“I like strong narrative drive, even though some of my very favorite films are more internal and meandering, like The 400 Blows, Terms of Endearment, 8 1/2, Wild Strawberries, or Lost in Translation. One of the greatest filmmakers to never win an Academy Award, Alfred Hitchcock, felt that making a movie was , ‘like telling a story to your seven-year-old niece, sitting on your knee. If at any point in the telling you stop, you want her to eagerly ask, ‘And then what happened?”

If you’re going to tell me a story about your first date, your first sexual encounter, you want it to be clear, compelling, and entertaining, and to have me, the listener, satisfied at the end. That satisfaction doesn’t have to mean happy; the classic movie A Man for All Seasons ends with the leading character, Sir Thomas More, being executed. But it’s an execution he chose rather than desert his personal beliefs of truth and justice. I, the audience, felt ennobled and enriched living through his experience.”

Lawerence Turman (producer of The Graduate)So You Want to Be a Producer
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In my last post I wrote about Missouri’s influence on Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson, and how he wrote his first play during lunchtime while working at an ad agency in Chicago. But those weren’t the only things that shaped him as a writer. When Wilson was 26-years-old he moved to New York City in […]